Tag: mobile game apps

This new recruitment technique has been gamified to help to reduce the risk of unconscious bias.

Unilever has announced a new mobile gaming strategy it has launched as a part of its new hire selection process. They have added this new technique in order to promote diversity while speeding up the process as a whole and reducing the cost of hiring.

This giant consumer goods company is launching the process in the UK following success in other countries.

Unilever has already implemented similar mobile gaming strategy programs in the United States and Asia. They have proven to be successful for hiring new staff in those regions. The British and Dutch company is now expanding the program to save money and time while limiting the risk of unconscious bias when new staff is hired. Considering the fact that last year saw applications from 250,000 graduates around the world, this is an important step. The strategy brings mobile games together with video interviews.

That said, other companies have used mobile gamification to help the process. For instance, Vodafone, L’Oréal UK and Ireland, Microsoft, and Ernst & Young. Those brands each use the Debut mobile app as a part of their hiring process.

In Unilever’s case, new applicants complete an online application form. Those who do so successfully then receive an application to play a number of games for a maximum of twenty minutes. Those with the best results are selected to receive a video interview. The applicants who are preferred during that phase move on to the final stage. In that stage, they take a virtual tour of the Unilever offices and experience a virtual collaboration. This provides them with an idea of how it feels to work within one of the company’s real environments.

The mobile gaming strategy for hiring was, in part, a response to data such as that produced by University College London and the Monster employment website. That research indicated that nearly half of all firms use video interviews as a component of their selection process. Moreover 7 percent no longer conduct face-to-face interviews. This occurs, despite the fact that it could promote appearance-based discrimination.

Thought this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to many, a study has just confirmed this suspicion.

EEDAR, a video and mobile games research firm, has now released the results of a data analysis it has conducted in order to confirm what many people have suspected about game app use for some time now.

Mobile device owners tend to use their gadgets to play games to pass time, not for the challenge or fun of it.

Though it is not entirely surprising, it remains quite interesting, particularly for developers of mobile games and especially for those creating multiplayer experiences. According to the report from EEDAR, about 74 percent of people in North America who play game apps do so in order to kill time. Twelve percent do so in order to interact with other people while 16 percent do so in order to be able to compete with other propel.

This helps to expand on the insight that was offered by Flurry in a mobile games study conducted last year.

Flurry, an analytics company owned by Yahoo, reported that there had been a notable decline in the average amount of time users were spending on mobile game apps. That report was created in 2015. Simon Khalaf, an exec at Flurry, explained that American mobile game players weren’t spending as much time on those mobile apps as they had bumped up the amount of time they were spending watching other people while they played.

This helped to explain why there had simultaneously been a boost in the amount of time spent on sites such as YouTube and Twitch for watching other people playing games on their consoles, computers and their mobile devices as well.

Patrick Walker, an EEDAR exec, discussed this shift in mobile games trends when he spoke at the GDC 2016 with regards to player engagement. Among the subjects on which he focused was the reason people in North American and Japan were playing these game apps. In Japan, only 5 percent had said that they were playing in order to compete with others, less than a third of the North American statistic.